Improving Demand Planning and Inventory Optimization inside SAP ERP

After 22 years of implementing demand planning in SAP ERP solutions for our customers, we’ve seen every scenario under the sun. In the process of solving our customers’ business requirements and supporting their growing enterprises, common threads stand out and patterns emerge. As we assisted our customers with managing inventory, production, purchasing and forecasting, we saw a clear need to improve performance, efficiency and drive cost savings.

In 2014 we polled 100 SAP users to see if their supply chains were optimized and how they were performing demand planning. The results were stark; 85 percent were not optimized, and of those, 65 percent were performing demand planning using manual spreadsheets. In this day and age, with so much advanced technology at our fingertips, manually exporting data out of a core ERP system for planning, analysis and decision making is not only tedious, it’s ridiculous!

A Solution Inside SAP ERP

Our parent company in Germany had observed the same problems amongst their customers. Fortunately, they found an answer their customers love and capable of closing these troublesome gaps in functionality. G.I.B is an SAP partner that provides solutions that solve these supply chain challenges in core ERP, and has seen broad adoption in the German and greater European markets. Seeing the company’s satisfied customer base, built on over 300 successful implementations, we knew they were onto something, and chose to introduce the G.I.B Dispo-Cockpit solutions to the US market.

Stellar Results, Stronger Supply Chains

Since bringing G.I.B Dispo-Cockpit to the US, we’ve implemented over two dozen solutions, and seen an equally strong reception amongst our American clients. One of our clients is GOJO Industries, the inventor of Purell® hand sanitizer. John Hooker, VP of IT at GOJO recently implemented the G.I.B solutions and said, “The GIB Operations and Planning modules were up and running within 5 weeks.  We immediately realized tangible savings that resulted in a 6 week ROI.  In addition, our production planning and scheduling processes were improved and streamlined, allowing us to reduce our time and effort by 50%.”.

Results like this is what keeps me excited about SAP solutions after all these years!   Being able to help enterprises make big improvements to their supply chain simply and affordably provides tremendous job satisfaction.

This is the first blog in a series about demand planning and inventory optimization.

Part 2 – Improve Demand Forecasting within SAP ERP and Reduce Inventory Cost.

Part 3 – Improve Inventory Performance with Discrete Optimization

Part 4 – Optimize SAP Procurement While Balancing Vendor Restrictions and Excess Inventory in Your Network

Part 5 – Top 4 Supply Chain Issues & Fixes in SAP that Pay Back